Harper's Magazine

HARPER’S MAGAZINE, the oldest general interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation through such celebrated features as Readings, Annotation, and Findings, as well as the iconic Harper’s Index.

Harper’s Magazine

LETTERS

EASY CHAIR • Liberal Despair

STATE OF THE ART • By Jackson Arn, from “Grids, Glass, and More Glass,” which appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Liberties.

WERKAHOLIC • By Richard Wagner, from a letter of November 1864 to Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria, who had paid off the composer’s debts. The correspondence was collected in Letters for the Ages: The Great Musicians, edited by James Drake and Edward Smyth, and published in September by Bloomsbury. Translated from the German by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington.

WEALTH OF CREATIONS • By Adam Smyth, from a list of projects undertaken and abandoned by the author, published in October on TEXT!, his Substack newsletter.

TRIAL OF CONSCIENCE • By Emily Wilder, from “Forty-Eight Hours in Israeli Captivity,” which was published in October by Jewish Currents. Wilder was detained by the Israel Defense Forces while aboard a ship in a humanitarian convoy en route to Gaza.

SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY • By Diane Williams, from Issue 79 of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern.

LIFE SENTENCES • By John Edgar Wideman, adapted from Slaveroad, which was issued in paperback in October by Scribner.

SLOT-MACHINE LEARNING • From “Can Large Language Models Develop Gambling Addiction?,” a preprint study conducted by the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, in South Korea, and submitted in September to the Cornell University open-access archive arXiv.

TO BE FRANK • By Shane Kowalski, from Are People Out There, which was published in October by Future Tense Books.

NEW POETRY • By Riley Jones, from a manuscript in progress

TURNING POINT • How the GOP consensus on Israel cracked

HARPER’S MAGAZINE

TURNING INWARD

POWER BROKERS • What’s really behind your soaring utility bills

IF A TREE FALLS • The trial of the Sycamore Gap killers

IN THE LAND OF THE DATA BLIND • Why political science can’t grasp Trumpism

ALIENS IN MINGUS

SOLUTION TO THE DECEMBER PUZZLE

NEW BOOKS

IN THE AFTERMATH OF VICTORY • Malcolm Cowley and the dream of the American canon

ANNIVERSARY

FINDINGS

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